Chamber and committees

We see widening inequality and we see equality regressing in so many different areas. As Andrew Groundwater said, if a lot of the focus has been on compliance and process, how do we make the shift if we still need standardisation or comparability of data collection? If we are still not doing that, after however many years the policy has been in place, how are we using the equality duty to make things better for people on the ground? We might have a good process, but how do you see it translating to positive outcomes?

Thanks for that. You were clear in what you said about being able to share good practice and in what you said about departmental silos. There are organisational silos and institutional silos, and you have the opportunity to blur some of those boundaries. That could be very effective.

Do the proposed reforms of PSED go far enough? Would you like to see them go further or do more—or give you more opportunity to do more—to ensure that we achieve the outcomes that we want to achieve through PSED?

John, I ask you the same question. Given some of the significant challenges with the public sector completely missing equalities targets and outcomes, what are the challenges with the PSED as it stands? You spoke about a focus on prevention. The committee has heard about the inadequate support that has been provided for the range of services that groups such as disabled people should expect to receive.

Thanks for that. You mention the need for skills and expertise and the need for data analysts who can identify data and provide support to organisations. However, one can be good at data analysis without necessarily knowing how to translate that into policy or action. Will the proposed reforms support you with that, or is there still something missing in the Scottish Government’s look ahead for the PSED?

—particularly in relation to some of the other rights that you talked about, such as marches and the right to protest. Some communities clearly feel over-policed, but that is perhaps for another day.

Jillian, given your scrutiny role across the public sector, where are the good points when it comes to fostering good relations, and where do we fall short?

I want to tease that out a little bit more. I am familiar with the turnaround from using the term “hard to reach” to using the term “seldom heard”. The framing that I like is “easy to ignore”, because that makes it very clear whose responsibility it is to engage. However, even those terms can fail—that might be because of one incident or maybe decades of incidents of discrimination and prejudice by the police—because communities or individuals in communities do not want to engage with the police and might even feel threatened and intimidated by them. How do you foster good relations in those situations?

We could probably go on with this conversation—

Thank you, convener, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us and for your comments so far.

You have all said in different ways that you think that you and your colleagues have a good understanding of what is required of you under the public sector equality duty. One of the reasons why we are undertaking this piece of work is that, in the absence of the Scottish Government’s human rights bill and the opportunity to talk about rights realisation through that, it has become very clear that there is a need to ensure that local authorities and public bodies are attuned to their duties under the Equality Act 2010 and, in particular, to the PSED, especially given that inequalities are rising in certain sectors between certain groups and also within certain protected characteristics.

To what extent do you think that the PSED, as it stands, is delivering for the people of Scotland, bearing in mind that there are still many significant inequalities issues across the different protected characteristic groups, between them and in communities as a whole?

Thank you—that is useful. It is great that we have this range of witnesses today, because that is exactly the kind of variation that we must understand. One size will not fit all across Scotland, and we must ensure that we understand what will and will not work in different places.

Three MSPs on the committee cover Aberdeenshire, so we will try to not pick on you, Martin.

We know that the Scottish Government is in the process of reforming the equality duty, and you have all mentioned, in slightly different ways, crossovers, the regulatory landscape and the need to reconnect some of the pieces—I think that Nareen used the word “harmonising” when talking about the regulatory landscape earlier. Do you think that some of that work is under way as part of the Scottish Government’s proposed reforms of the PSED, or do you think that those reforms do not go far enough? Do you see that harmonising in those reforms, or is there still work to do? I will come to you, Nareen, and then go around the table.